You can be afraid in a press conference, nervous, sweaty, but you can't be afraid when you do your work because it doesn't work that way.

Listening is everything. Listening is the whole deal. That's what I think. And I mean that in terms of before you work, after you work, in between work, with your children, with your husband, with your friends, with your mother, with your father. It's everything. And it's where you learn everything.

The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.

They were showing clips from my earlier films. All I could see was this beautiful young woman who was anxious about whether she was too heavy or if her nose was too big. I felt like saying to her, 'Just relax and it will all be OK.

The formula of happiness and success is just, being actually yourself, in the most vivid possible way you can.

But for me, it [singing] was a way to get out the feeling of the song, and also to get out the feelings that, you know, roil in high school, to express something that I had no other way of expressing.

I've grown up well, partly because there weren't great girls' literature - Nancy Drew, maybe - but there weren't things. So there was Huck Finn and "Spin And Marty." The boys characters were interesting and you lived through them when you're watching it.